Community advisory boards help shape our future

A few months ago, I was at the Norman Rockwell Museum and I ran across his "Four Freedoms" series again.  I always enjoyed his work and am in awe of his ability to capture humanity in such a poignant manner.  As such, in light of our recent community advisory board meeting, I thought the "Freedom of Speech" image was an appropriate image to represent this blog post about the community advisory board.  What is our community advisory board?  In September, we kicked off this initiative  to hear how a cross-section of our audiences use certain features, functionality, and content on our sites.  Additionally we want to determine and how we might go about improving those to enhance the overall experience help people be more successful performing their key tasks. 

All in all, the whole event went very well, and I wanted to share our strategies as to how we did it.  I realize that there are many ways of doing this, and I do not purport what we did is the best way.  Rather, it's just the way we chose (and it worked!).  Any feedback, suggestions and the like that you have is greatly appreciated.

Identifying key participants

My team spans across many different segments of technical professionals.  This is most evident in our MSDN (for developers), TechNet (for IT professionals) and Expression (for designers.) site experiences.  Ensuring that we have representatives across these audiences is key in understanding how basic social issues such as trust and reputation factor into decision making.  In addition to getting a cross section of different audiences, ensuring that we have a representative  sample across company size and location is something we sought from participants.  The specific individuals were contacted through our own extended social networks (at least two or three degrees of separation), so the ask was more personalized.

Determining  goals

Given our current schedule, we knew we wanted to talk about reputation, broadly defined.  More specifically, we wanted to identify key indicators of trust and to get some sense of the priority of them for the participants.  On a more tactical level, we wondered if the current way in which reputation is manifested in our forums is the best way we surface this.  These items for discovery became the key goals we set for ourselves with the first attempt at a community advisory board.

Selecting the right tools

As our participants are scattered geographically, an asynchronous means of connecting people became a key requirement for this initiative.  Looking at our existing resources, using a private forum became a natural choice.  The privacy options in our forums helped ensure that only the participants are in the discussion.  The threaded nature of the forum helped us "contain" discussions on a particular question on a given thread; I would pose one question (related to our goals) and the discussion would follow.  

In addition to the forum, we also used an old fashioned conference call for a real time discussion.  As good as asynchronous discussions can be, there's nothing quite like a real time conversation for surfacing additional ideas.

To facilitate most of this, email played a crucial role in our tool kit.  Email was used to identify prospective participants, in addition to getting them set up with the tools.

Documents/collateral.  To help spur discussion, I also pulled together a quick PowerPoint to frame the agenda for the call.

Putting it all together

1. Emails sent out to identify prospective participants
2. Private forum created
3. Background information for forum posted
4. Background information consists of:
   Biographies of participants (collected via email)
   Biographies of planning team
   Basic forum guidelines and FAQs
   Background information on the project, reputation an trust
5. SkyDrive public share created for possible collateral (ultimately not used due to time)
6. Welcome message posted to forum
7. First question posted to forums
8. Wait a little bit to see if people respond naturally
9. Emails to specific individuals to spur participation in forums
10. Direct responses to participants as they posted replies
11. My replies consisted of any of the following:
    Thanking people for participation
    Welcoming first time participants
    Follow up questions
12. Second question posted to forum
13. [repeat 7 - 11]
14. Third question posted to forum
15. [repeat 7 - 11]
16. Create conference call agenda via PowerPoint
17. Distribute agenda and call in information (via email)
18. Hold conference call
19. Take notes
20. Post notes/key takeaways on forum
21. Ask others for their key takeaways
22. Document process
23. Blog about it :-)
24. Refine as needed

While it may seem a bit dry when listed out like that, I found the whole experience to be quite engaging.  In many ways, this is similar to what happens when you bring together  small group of people in a Meetup or Conversation Café.  That we opted to do this in an online forum and a call was just the way we did it to help bridge time and space.

Looking back, there are some aspects I would change -- perhaps leveraging a file share like SkyDrive more.  I'm also wondering about the benefit of recording conference calls a la Live Meeting or some other set of recording tools.  While it can be valuable when it's necessary to be in sync with slides of demos, I don’t think that was really needed for our specific agenda.  Those are just some initial thoughts off the top of my head.

Based on the methodology listed above, what would you suggest as changes to explore?

For anyone that's interested, I've embedded a download of the discussion slides in addition to a slideshow of what we talked about during the call.